Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill (Third sitting)

Chris Philp Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 30th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Thank you very much. We will start with questions. We have until 9.55 am, when we have to end the session bang on the dot. First, I will ask the Minister if he would like to ask some questions.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Philp)]

Q 142 Mr Fairhurst, good morning. Let me start by thanking you for joining us and giving evidence this morning. I also thank you and all your members on behalf of the Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor, and I am sure the whole House of Commons, for the extraordinary dedication that your members show in discharging their duties in prisons up and down the country.

Mark Fairhurst: Thank you. That is most welcome, and it will be appreciated.

[Chris Philp]

Q Good. May I start by asking about the monitoring and risk assessment that goes on in prisons? The reason I am asking is that, as you probably know, the Bill provides for serious terrorist offenders to stay in prison for the whole of their prison term, without the prospect of early release, so it is very important that we monitor and assess the risks during that sentence. Can you talk a bit about the work that is done in prisons to monitor and assess the risk of prisoners on an ongoing basis, both during the sentence and in the run-up to their release?

Mark Fairhurst: Sure. It is very much intelligence led and risk based. Throughout a TACT offender’s sentence, they will be allocated a key worker officer, who will get to know them and help them through their sentence plan. During that sentence plan, they will be offered the opportunity to address their offending behaviour, and they will be offered two deradicalisation programmes while they are in custody.

Staff will observe their behaviour on the wings, and who they mix with, and they will submit intelligence reports on a regular basis, specifically if they have concerns around radical behaviour while an offender is in custody. That will then lead to a multi-agency approach, and when the offender is coming up to their release point with the Parole Board, we put in place MAPPA arrangements. We will have reports from prison officers, psychologists, psychiatrists and healthcare, and we will liaise with security services, and a full picture will be presented prior to that person’s release.

As we have just witnessed with the Streatham attacker, he left prison as a high-risk, category A offender. The intelligence and the risks that we highlighted to the security services led to him being monitored 24 hours a day, because he was a significant risk to the public. When you look at it in that vein, what we did was appropriate and led to an atrocity being avoided because of the swift reaction. So I think we have got the risk part of the sentence planning really sufficient while in custody.

[Chris Philp]

Q Let me congratulate your colleagues on the work that they did in identifying the Streatham risk. Interestingly in the Streatham case, the release point was automatic; there was no Parole Board involvement. Just to be absolutely clear, all of the risk assessment that you have described—the MAPPA, the psychologists’ reports and everything else that was then passed on to the police—can and does happen, even where there is no Parole Board involvement in the release, as was the case in Streatham and as would be the case under the new sentences we are talking about.

Mark Fairhurst: Yes, that is correct, even—[Inaudible] —reached the halfway point, because legislation dictated that we had no option but to do that. The intelligence we had gathered on his antisocial behaviour and radical behaviour in prison led the Security Service to believe that they were right in following and monitoring him upon his release so extensively. That would be the case in this situation as well. I believe that, with this Bill, at the two-thirds point, people must go through a parole process.

[Chris Philp]

Q Well, no. For some offenders that is the case, but the most serious offenders will serve the entirety of their prison sentence in prison. Some will get Parole Board appraisal at the two-thirds point, but under this new legislation the most serious will spend the whole sentence in prison, which leads me on to my next question. Some people have suggested that without the prospect of Parole Board early release, it might be harder to control prisoners’ behaviour, because you have not got the carrot of early release that can be offered. Is that an analysis you share, or do you think that there are other ways of controlling prisoner behaviour in prison, even where there is no prospect of early Parole Board release?

Mark Fairhurst: That is a really valid point, and these concerns have been expressed from the frontline. I can give you an example. At the moment, if we are going to extend the sentences, and we are going to insist that the most serious offenders spend the entire sentence in prison, that will increase headroom in the high-security estate. Also, it incentivises people not to behave correctly or to go on deradicalisation courses.

For example, at the moment, we have funding, and we should have open three separation centres, but we have only got one, with a small number of the most influential and serious terrorist offenders, in play. That leads to serious concerns from my members who are in that separation centre at HMP Frankland, because we are now in a situation where the prisoners who are housed there are not engaging with staff whatever. We have had a really violent assault on a prison officer, and there is nowhere to transfer those prisoners to if they show violence towards staff or if they become a security risk. That is why we need more separation centres open, especially with the implementation of this Bill. More concerningly, there is now no incentive for good behaviour.

[Chris Philp]

Q Clearly, those sentences are going to be served in full for reasons of public protection. You would probably agree that it is very hard to assess the risk of these kinds of terrorist offenders, particularly if they pretend to comply with deradicalisation programmes, but do not really mean it. Given that we are going to have these sentences served in full—it is a rather similar concept to automatic release at the halfway point, with no Parole Board involvement, and, of course, the majority of offences currently have automatic release at the halfway point with no Parole Board involvement—what measures do you think we should put in place to ensure good behaviour for those prisoners with no Parole Board early release? You mentioned additional separation centres, which is a very good idea. Can you talk the Committee through other steps that might be taken to ensure good behaviour by prisoners where the Parole Board carrot does not exist, whether that is SDS offenders currently or these new offenders in future?

Mark Fairhurst: I think the separation centres are the key. We need three open because, as you are all aware, the rise of the far right is a real concern for the security services. It would be unwise to put high-profile far-right extremist offenders in the same separation centre as Islamist extremist offenders, with staff stuck in the middle. That is the key point here.

To come to your point, what can we do to incentivise people to take part in deradicalisation courses if they know they are going to serve their full sentence? All we can do on the frontline is our best, and that is to try to engage with people, get to know them and encourage them to take part in deradicalisation. We involve imams and community groups to come in and speak to these people. We just keep chipping away, because it is down to the individual. Only the individual can change. We can encourage them to change. We can give them the ideas to change and the courses to help them change, but it is down to the individual. The biggest fear from the frontline is, “If I know, as a terrorist offender, that I am going to serve my full sentence, and I am not going to get any chance of early release, I might totally disengage, and that might reinforce my radical views, which leads me to a disruptive life inside.” That is the biggest fear.

[Chris Philp]

I understand, although, of course, if they step over the criminal threshold, they will be prosecuted. Equally, there is no value in people pretending to engage with deradicalisation programmes just to secure early release, so we need to be mindful of that risk as well. Thank you, Mr Fairhurst.

[The Chair]

Thank you. We move on to the shadow Minister, Alex Cunningham.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We have until 10.25 am for this session. Professor Acheson, thank you very much for joining us. Would you like to introduce yourself and your organisation briefly, please?

Professor Acheson: My name is Ian Acheson. I used to be a frontline prison officer, so I would like to be associated with the comments that were made this morning. They are the unsung heroes of our criminal justice system, often overlooked and certainly undervalued. They do an amazing job.

I worked in the Prison Service as an officer and then as a governor. I left it and joined the Home Office via the Youth Justice Board, where I was the senior civil servant responsible for the Contest strategy, our counter-terrorism strategy, among other things in south-west England. After that, I joined the Equality and Human Rights Commission as the chief operating officer and I left public service then. I now work for a variety of organisations, including the Counter Extremism Project, which is an international non-profit organisation that looks at ways of countering violent extremism. I am also a visiting professor at Staffordshire University School of Law, Forensics and Policing.

[Chris Philp]

Q Good morning, Professor Acheson. Thank you for taking the time to join us this morning. It is useful for us to hear from experts such as you. You have clearly done lots of work in the area of deradicalisation and counter-terrorism counselling and work. Could you describe to the Committee the techniques that you think are most effective in a prison setting to achieve the objective of deradicalisation?

Professor Acheson: The Prison Service, as we are all aware, is under a great deal of pressure, certainly in England and Wales. The backdrop is what I would describe as a significant decline in all sorts of metrics of good order, discipline and control across most, but not all, prisons. That provides a backdrop of instability, which is germane to your question. We need to have stable, well-run prisons with suitable and sufficient numbers of staff present to set the tone, to be able to control the environment and certainly to be able to spot and intervene early when they see signs of extremist-related behaviour, whether from prisoners imprisoned under terrorism legislation or others who look like they are being drawn into violent extremism.

One of the problems that I have with the system is that we do not seem to have an assertive and challenging approach to managing terrorist prisoners, or ideologically motivated prisoners, from the start of their sentence to their last day in community supervision. The system is fraught with problems of handovers between the Prison Service, the Parole Board and the probation service. I do not believe that that system of managing a particular set of prisoners with some unique characteristics is the right way of proceeding.

I would like to see a dedicated unit, if you will—I recommended that in my 2016 report; unfortunately it was not one of the recommendations that was taken forward—that manages offenders end to end, from literally the first night in custody to the last night of community sentence, and that has a detailed biographical understanding of a prisoner. That involves specialists, psychiatrists, theologians and various people intervening but managing that prisoner all the way through into the community.

Mark Fairhurst mentioned the importance of reintegration after custody for terrorist offenders. In some respects, integration is the key challenge as well. At the moment, the state has a monopoly on the management of terrorist offenders after custody in terms of MAPPA, where the probation service, the police and the Security Service manage the security aspects. There are no other organisations, apart from some voluntary organisations that are involved in the desistance and disengagement programme. We do not have any community involvement in the resettlement of terrorist offenders and their reintegration in the community. That is a big issue that needs to be addressed.

[Chris Philp]

Q You said that the engagement needs to be more assertive and used that word at the beginning of your answer. When you say “assertive”, what do you mean?

Professor Acheson: In relation to terrorist offenders, for example, the situation feels to me as though, as long as they are not creating any problems, they are largely left alone. When they start to create problems, there are alternatives, which could include segregation, administrative penalties or incentives and earned privileges penalties. In extremis, if they are subversive—this was one of my recommendations that was taken forward, as you might be aware—separation centres exist for them.

We need to make sure that we look at it from the sentencing point. To illustrate it like this: what is really important is that we have got some sort of baseline measurement for a judge, after a conviction, to inform sentencing. We do not have that at the moment. We do have pre-sentence reports, I understand that, but we do not have a sufficient level of granularity or expertise put into that plan, which is the baseline measurement of dangerousness, for any terrorist offenders.

As you are aware, they are a very heterogeneous group. They resist being compartmentalised. We have people who murder people who are losers and we have people who murder people who are university graduates. There is an enormous variety and it resists generic sheep dip-style approaches. I am afraid I would categorise healthy identity intervention as one of those processes that I do not think works. We need to go back to having this baseline measurement at the start, managed by one unit all the way through that is frequently looking at whether dangerousness has increased or decreased, and devising and managing interventions to meet that individual pathology, that individual terrorist profile.

I am aware that Lord King has said in Parliament that you are recruiting some prison imams to take part in ideological interventions. That is very good news—so, theological, psychological, family-related and substance misuse. It is important to look at these people as individuals if you want to reduce their dangerousness. It is important to look at that dangerousness as early as possible, with the right people managing it all the way through.

As I have said before—I do not want to repeat myself—I think the system is far too fractured at the moment. We are only talking about 220-odd offenders at the moment, with the Government making what I think is the fairly optimistic estimate of an extra 50 as a result of the new legislation. It will increase because of the police and security services’ ability to spot people further and further upstream from actual terrorist incidents. That number will increase, but it is still a manageable number and it is still worth while investing significantly.

I am not a great fan of the statistic that is bandied about that says that only 5% to 10% of terrorist offenders reoffend after custody. That is a proven reconviction for a terrorist offence. That is a very lazy proxy for damage. If you apply that to our number of offenders, that means there are another 11 Sudesh Ammans in the system. That is completely intolerable and unacceptable. I do not think we should be comforted by the fact that some research is showing us that recidivism is fairly low. There is research in Europe that says that the period immediately following release of a terrorist offender is the period of most risk. That does not fit the profile of the Westminster bridge attacker, who waited for 11 or 12 months before something mobilised him into murdering two young people. We have to apply a very individualised, very assertive and challenging approach.

You talked about incentives and so on earlier with Mark Fairhurst. I think that might be looking at it in slightly the wrong way. I have a bit of a problem with the philosophical and organisational fitness of the Prison Service, the probation service and the Parole Board to manage these particular offenders. They are ideologically inspired offenders. We must insist they adopt civilised values, not look at it as a thing that needs to be rewarded. That is very difficult. I am not suggesting it is simple.

Just to avoid any misunderstanding, in my specification for separation centres, I specifically designed a regime—and suggested this to the Prison Service—that was not punitive and which was, as I have described it, a humanised approach. We cannot talk to dead terrorists; we can talk to live ones. We can find out an enormous amount. We can influence them an enormous amount with the right skills and the right staffing to be able to have a good sense of how dangerous they are and influence them towards disengagement, or desistance if disengagement is not possible.

[The Chair]

I suspect that your evidence is extremely useful to the Committee, but I have to ask for slightly shorter answers, please.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Q Professor Silke, thank you for taking the time to give evidence to the Committee this morning. Based on your experience from around the world, could you tell the Committee your views on the most effective ways of managing and ideally deradicalising prisoners within a prison environment?

Professor Silke: That is a crucial question. Probably one of the starting points—this has been touched on by some of the others who gave evidence—is how the UK sits in terms of the international approach to dealing with terrorism among violent extremist offenders. Overall, you would probably argue that the UK’s approach is seen as one of the better available approaches and enjoys what is seen internationally as a good success rate. I know that that is difficult to consider in the context of the attacks that took place in Streatham and London Bridge, but overall the UK’s system for dealing with terrorist prisoners is seen as one of the more effective ones available internationally.

[Chris Philp]

Q Which elements are particularly effective, and do you see any opportunities to improve them further?

Professor Silke: The approach has transformed a lot in the past 10 years. There has been a variety of ways in which it has changed. I am particularly looking at the approach in England and Wales here. First is the development of specialised risk assessment tools and frameworks for dealing with terrorist prisoners. There was recognition in the 2000s that the existing risk assessment tools did not work well with terrorist prisoners and that they needed something that was more specialised to more reliably assess risk with them. This led to the development of the extremism risk guidance 22+—the ERG—which is a bespoke risk assessment tool now used in England and Wales. In my view it has genuinely enhanced and transformed risk assessment for these prisoners, making it much more viable compared with what it had been prior to the introduction of this programme.

Tied into the development of the ERG has been the development of a number of interventions. The healthy identity intervention has already been mentioned, and desistance and disengagement has been flagged as well. The healthy identity intervention draws on the ERG, so the two of them are linked to some degree. HII has come in for criticism, but it is actually a much better intervention than perhaps it gets credit for. It tackles a lot of the issues that we are concerned about in terms of offender radicalisation. I have had the opportunity of being able to interview prisoners before and after they have gone on this programme, and certainly in many cases I have seen a transformational change in prisoners.

The other factor—this has also been raised in other testimony before the Committee—relates to post-release behaviour by prisoners. We have an extremely low reoffending rate for terrorist prisoners in the UK, which we should not dismiss out of hand. If we could get similarly low levels of reoffending for other types of offenders, we would be extremely happy.

Failures with interventions—such as a prisoner taking an intervention, being released and then reoffending—does not mean that the intervention itself is useless or ineffective in the majority of cases for people who use it. We should reflect that all the interventions used in the prison system, for a whole range of offences, have their failures. This does not mean that we should stop using them or abandon them or view them as unhelpful in the majority of cases.

[Chris Philp]

Q Thank you. Would you agree that the historical involvement of the Parole Board in offering the possibility of early release does not really have any meaningful impact on prisoner rehabilitation or behaviour? Or to the extent that it does, that it may simply stimulate false compliance—pretending to comply with deradicalisation programmes in the hope of securing early release?

Professor Silke: It is a complicated question. In general, I agree with Mark Fairhurst’s point that the potential for early release is an important incentive for behaviour in custody. If we lose the potential for early release, we are losing a tool from the toolbox, and we need to question whether that is sensible, or whether there are advantages in keeping it in some shape or form.

Does false compliance happen? Yes, it certainly does, but if we look at reoffending stats, compliance seems to be genuine in most cases. Nobody has a 100% effective intervention for dealing with these types of prisoner or any other type of prisoner, so we should never expect an intervention to be 100% accurate. However, the stats suggest that what is happening in prison with most terrorist prisoners is currently effective, and so if we are making changes to the regime and to the interventions, we need to have a careful think about what the knock-on consequences might be.

Personally, I prefer still to have the potential for early release at some stage as a tool in the toolbox for these serious offenders. I think it can make a difference in some cases. From my perspective, the Parole Board usually brings a serious and considered assessment of the available evidence in a particular case, which is often very welcome. Again, by removing that from the equation, are we losing something that has value?

[Alex Cunningham]

Q Good morning, Professor Silke. Are the current deradicalisation programmes in prisons fit for purpose? If not, what needs to happen?

Professor Silke: The problems are relatively new. My view is that they work far better than most members of the general public want to think. Again, the proof is in the very low reconviction rates that we see after people have been released. If it is working in the vast majority of cases, that is an encouraging sign. If there are failures, we need to look into that. One thing that the Bill does not do in its current format is try to identify what is different about the failures compared with the rest of the prisoners who are being released—what went wrong in their cases compared to the others? I am not sure that we are getting at that at the moment.

The evidence base around both risk assessment and interventions for terrorist prisoners is in development. It is massively better today than 10 years ago, and I think it will continue to improve. I know that the Ministry of Justice is involved in a range of programmes to improve the evidence base around ERG and healthy identity intervention, which I strongly welcome. Many Governments are involved in similar efforts overseas.